Love Is Making Its Way Back Home – Josh Ritter and Prominent Figures

Love Is Making Its Way Back Home is an absolutely amazing detailed video created with over 12,000 pieces of construction paper for folk-leaning singer and songwriter Josh Ritter by Prominent Figures.

The stop-motion animation for “Love Is Making Its Way Back Home” uses photographs culled from over 12,000 pieces of construction paper to animate a nighttime drive. A team of nearly twenty artists, editors, directors and product assistants ushered the video into being. The group started with storyboarding and computer animation before converting the digital graphics to paper cutouts (frame by frame), photographing those 12,000 cutouts and then stitching them together into four minutes of paper animation.

The video you see in the end is purely physical frame by frame animation. Everything you see is photographs of paper with no effects whatsoever. One of the most challenging parts of making the video was looking at the computer screen during the pre-animation phase in rigid black and white with no shadow or depth, and trying to visualize how it would later look and work as paper in 3D space.

We had to determine ahead of time which images to cut as positives or negatives, how to anchor the cutouts to the paper frame that surrounds it so the pieces wouldn’t fall out, and a host of other problems.

The final stage was photographing – good old stop-motion animation done at 15 frames per second. The frames were hung vertically from hooks in 23 rows, row 1 being closest to the camera, row 23 farthest away. The rig was setup in our makeshift cave of thick black blankets hung from the ceiling to keep out all light. The paper scenes were then lit from the front and below, and photographed with a digital still camera on a tripod.